Grizl: Rojen v ognju

Self-released
Release date: 1. 9. 2023
Production: Grizl
Album length: 45.38 min
Genre: Hard Rock
Rating: 10/10
Buy the album!

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Grizl, a Slovenian hard rock band from Brežice, are back on the scene with their third studio album, “Rojen v ognju”. Led by singer and guitarist Zoran Zlatič, the group is serving up the most mature work of their creative career to date. No doubt about it. After the debut “17 mečev” (2015), which, despite an ambitious start and bold moves, still carried a fair helping of naivety, the band carved out their artistic character on the follow-up, “Pod pritiskom” (2020, RockLine review). Their own homegrown stance in musical expression. The motifs became more clearly defined, and the album brought a wonderfully catchy, easy-to-love level of listenability, while also proving that the band had reached a markedly higher quality level in terms of arrangements.

“Rojen v ognju” carries on down the path of its predecessor “Pod pritiskom”. It delivers even more infectiousness and musical swagger, and it often clicks on the very first listen, which, compared to the band’s earlier work, wasn’t exactly the standard. The quintet is made up of seriously experienced musicians, loaded with real mileage and know-how, and masterfully armed with technical polish as well as a finely tuned sense for tightening the songs up to the point of striking dynamics and flow across the album. “Rojen v ognju” is a great mix of top-shelf musical accessibility, pushing moments where the band would swerve into time signature changes or indulge in modulations that would loosen the motivic compactness into the background, or even strictly eliminating them. That doesn’t mean you can’t hear the quintet’s exceptional technical sharpness throughout the album, since there’s no shortage of extra transitional ornaments, only they’re placed in such a way that they intensify the songs’ compactness at most. It’s proof of a higher artistic insight embodied in the new album, which of course reflects the fact that the band’s arrangers and composers have matured even further in terms of musical expression. It’s worth adding that during the recording phase the band teamed up with Borut Antončič, who surely lent his services to the musicality of the songs themselves, as he’s known for his fine instinct for how to put a composition together so that it ignites straight away. Teaming up with Borut proved to be a winning poker hand of aces, one worth keeping up their sleeve for the band’s future creative endeavors too.

“Rojen v ognju” is the story of ten excellent hard rock tracks, polished down to the last detail. Both sonically and compositionally. Drago Popovič emphasized the liveliness of the record’s nature; the sound is distinctly three-dimensional and radiates a welcome organic warmth. The pronounced warmth of the vivid, funk-tinged bass lines does its part too, reinforcing the stocky rhythms of the songs. On the other side, there’s the equally stocky support of the Hammond lines and, of course, the guitar phrasing, which draws inspiration from the old days of rock and reaches decisively into the seventies. That’s why the character of the tracks echoes elements of rhythm & blues and blues rock, and at moments even knocks on the door of flirting with southern rock (Ujet na soncu). At its core, though, this is a retro-sounding hard rock album that, with certain associations, even appeals to nostalgia. The songs reach for a skillfully slipped-in dose of pomp that builds to peaks in infectious and extremely listenable choruses. That’s why plenty of the songs on “Rojen v ognju” could spin on the bigger radio frequencies of the Slovenian music ‘mainstream’ without any trouble (if anyone even understands what that could be?). In short, “Rojen v ognju” is an exceptionally beautiful and accomplished record that will definitely move you. Shift you, sweep you away. In its sincerity and commitment it wins you over in an instant, and rewards the listener right away. It should be added that Zoran has made another developmental leap vocally in recent years. He’s grown into an excellent singer, which further adds to the grabbiness of the tracks themselves.

The favorite and the high point of the album’s polish is definitely its centerpiece, Ogenj in led. It’s crowned by the superbly worked harmonizing of the lead vocal with additional backing vocal lines, something Grizl have masterfully adopted from the doctrine of their rock heroes of the seventies. It’s precisely thanks to this interplay that the song reaches an atmospheric crescendo at the very end through gradual build-up. That’s the standard that matters internationally if you want a real shot at climbing toward the top of the charts, something Slovenian rock has always treated like a stepmother (historically speaking). Consequently, even the songs on the string of albums released throughout the history of Slovenian rock that have potential don’t develop their full expressive optimum. So in this respect, too, there’s plenty to be learned from Grizl. With that hint, don’t expect The Sweet, Journey, Def Leppard, Uriah Heep or Queen on “Rojen v ognju”. But do expect Grizl!

The interweaving of the building blocks of the sound, that is, the contributions of the individual members of the quintet, has jumped to a higher level of maturity. The album delivers compactness of format at a considerably higher level than both of its studio predecessors, and while intensifying the musical virtues of artistry, the band also delivers undeniable proof of technical polish, for which there’s still plenty of room in the mid-eight passages, where they impress with their vivid and witty inventiveness. This is especially masterfully underlined by the development of the album’s closing composition, the track Zver v glavi.   

“Rojen v ognju” is a strong album. An album that deserves all your attention, and one that, with its virtues and its leap in maturity, undeniably shows that Grizl have grown into an entity on the Slovenian music scene that needs to be taken very seriously. With their retro hard rock and blues rock nature they’re actually filling a genre gap in our music scene, and if some phrase conjures up associations with the good old ZZ Top, the good old Aerosmith, the good old Deep Purple (Odhajam naprej), and also the good old Lynyrd Skynyrd and Big Brother And The Holding Company (a few seconds in the opening Zob za zob, a cheeky one, evoke part of Hendrix’s famous improvisation on Star Spangled Banner), the band has masterfully woven all of this together with Slovenian lyrics that, in their use of meter, are an optimized textbook example, proof that the Slovenian language can be musical and melodic in music too. It’s precisely this successful collision of the Slovenian language with the classic phrases of the old rock school craft that is the trick Grizl use to achieve their own musical passion. So the thought that just crossed my mind, that ‘if Bonamassa can borrow, so can Grizl’, is totally superfluous and out of place. In short, there’s no joking around with “Rojen v ognju”. A truly gorgeous record by Slovenian standards. If we go further and look at this year’s releases on the Slovenian music scene, it definitely hasn’t found a genre peer that could match it artistically. This might last. At least until (I’m exaggerating!) some Sausages wake up from their sleep.

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Tracklist:
1. Zob za zob (4:00)
2. Nauči se pasti (5:09)
3. Ti mi povej (5:18)
4. Ogenj in led (5:14)
5. Še en korak (5:06)
6. Muza (3:54)
7. Ujet na soncu (4:51)
8. Odhajam naprej (4:21)
9. Ostali bomo isti (3:51)
10. Zver v glavi (3:38)

Lineup:
Zoran Zlatič – guitar, vocals
Jure Turel – guitar
Matjaž Predanič – keyboards, backing vocals
Tomi Gregel – bass guitar, backing vocals
Ivica Gregel – drums

Guest musician:
Anja Kramar – backing vocals

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